Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience

‘Shit life syndrome’ (SLS), as the doctors call it, is when ‘finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources … It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.’

According to Leach, sufferers of give-up-itis progress through a series of five stages. It starts with a general withdrawal before turning into apathy, loss of emotional response, and a lack of response to any external stimulus. Along the way, motivation to do menial tasks erodes until the simplest of tasks can no longer be completed. Listlessness

you aren’t taught that when you do good things good things happen, or that when you do nothing or bad things the result is bad, you learn instead that ‘It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do, I’m powerless to affect the world.